Archive for March, 2010

“I am the center.
Power and sacrifice can only exist together,
like an eye and the sense of sight.
The light surrounds my foes,
and they are blind to all but me.
If any heart will be stilled,
it will be mine.”

Kito’s characters are typical Moe character, which tickles your heart because they are so cute. They look very gentle and how he colors character is very soft. It gives us a moment of peace by looking at his characters.

The mysterious message mentioned in the previous post was from EFINK (NSFW), founder of the circle ESTABLISH NECHOES (also with NSFW content), which is dedicated to Nekomimi. While I enjoyed reading other people’s speculation as to what his purpose might be in contacting me, I didn’t think he would actually ask me to join his circle or contribute to their next project. My skill level is still too far below the level of actual professionals.

Still not good enough

EFINK’s reason for contacting me was nothing more than to show his appreciation after I blogged about ESTABLISH NECHOES, and after he read Miao Diary. But, you might ask, wasn’t that like a year ago?

Yes, he had wanted to contact me, but couldn’t easily find my email address on this site. Before he could search more, my site got hacked for the second time. The hacker installed malware on my site, and although the site was speedily purged and restored from backups, it was enough to give my site a bad reputation at places like the Web of Trust, causing various safe browsing tools to block my site long after Google had removed it from their blacklist. Unable to get to my site, EFINK gave up on trying to contact me for the time being.

I just received an email from a professional Japanese artist, who shall remain unnamed until circumstances become clearer. This artist represents a circle of artists, one of whom is in my top 3 favorite Japanese artists of all time. This circle is dedicated to drawing catgirls. He said he wanted to talk to me and asked whether the email he used was the proper one to contact me by.

I said he had the correct email and that I was open to talk, and am now waiting for his reply.

I wonder what he could want? I have never had any contact with his circle except posting on the oekaki BBS of one of the artists. Have I offended him in any way? Maybe used a picture from his circle without asking permission? Does he need my help promoting his circle to a foreign audience? Or is this an elaborate trick and the email is not from the person it claims to be from?

Update: I received his reply and will explain more in a later post. Yes, it concerns Miao Diary. No, he doesn’t want to translate it.

So, unless you’ve been living under a rock or are really new to this blog, you know that I am a J.C.Staff fanboy whose love for J.C.Staff exceeds his love for Toho and Magic the Gathering put together, and that the reason my art skills are the way they are today is because I sold my soul to J.C.Staff in 2005.

Then you may be wondering, why on earth has there been no J.C.Staff-related post since that Railgun post five months ago?

A Certain Scientific Railgun started off awesome but I kind of lost interest halfway through. Of the upcoming J.C.Staff shows, Maid-Sama looks like it has the potential to be a hit, and I might try a volume of the manga to see what it’s like, and I will definitely check out the anime in April, but it doesn’t have me excited the way Potemayo, Toradora, or even Index/Railgun did.

And as for Uraboku (Betrayal Knows My Name)… well, I tried Loveless because it was J.C.Staff, and I will try this for the same reason, but it’s going to have to be really special to get me to watch it. I mean, cool sparkly bishonen are something any aspiring comic artist should draw every now and then, but an entire show of them?

However, for some reason I have never found a Cirno x Suwako fanbook. I know they must be out there, but I’ve never seen one. I’ve seen Cirno x Daiyousei (which I also like, given the banner of this site) and Cirno x Utsuho (which is even more on crack than Cirno x Suwako), but no Cirno x Suwako. I’ve looked at doujin sites. I’ve asked a translator of Toho doujins if he has seen any. I even asked Samukun to look in comic stores in Japan. But so far I have had no success.

My friends in my Magic the Gathering playgroup know I like my cards green and dumb. And powerful green cards have been present for as long as I have been playing. But more often than not, a deck that is all green is not top-tier competitive. The current best mono-green deck in Standard involves Eldrazi Monument and token generators and it is powerful, but not at the same tier as Jund or the other top decks. The current best way to play green is in conjunction with other colors, and the current best green cards have a second color, such as Bloodbraid Elf (green/red), Maelstrom Pulse (green/black), Putrid Leech (green/black), and Sprouting Thrinax (green/black/red). Come to think of it, those are all Jund cards. Dammit, Jund.

So anyway, with the release of the new set, “Rise of the Eldrazi”, looming on the horizon, people are wondering whether it will contain cards that will give other decks tools to fight against Jund. I really only care about what mono-green gets, so here’s some cards I would like to see. Note that these cards are not real and will probably never be, and despite my attempts to balance them are probably overpowered like Yukari’s gap hax.